Condor

by M. L. Buchman

  Each section the welders sliced free was lofted on helicopter cargo lines within seconds. The Condor was disappearing with surprising speed. It was all the small debris that would be the real pest.

  Already a double line had formed back at the plane’s touchdown point.

  A line of pickup trucks was moving ahead slowly as a team gathered all of the larger pieces remaining once the welders and Black Hawks had moved on. The heaviest debris was being plucked up by a Little Bird helicopter and whisked away to wherever the two Black Hawks were using as a dump site.

  The Night Stalkers of the 160th SOAR were on the job and they were damned efficient.

  Behind them, the long string of personnel was doing a classic FOD walk. Take a step, stop, scan for Foreign Object Debris. Another step, another look. Each person, no more than an arm’s length from the next, had a trash bag. Not so much as a bolt that could be sucked up into a plane’s engine would be left behind when they were done.

  The plane’s tail and the two destroyed Stryker fire engines were already gone. All of the burned helicopter remains and one of the wings had already been removed as well.

  “What the hell, Holly?” Mike stepped right in front of her to block her view.

  “What’s your problem, Mike?”

  “You!”

  “No wucking furries with this Sheila.”

  “What?”

  “No fucking worries, mate. Grab a clue. I’m fine.”

  “So not! Miranda’s in there fighting for her life and you aren’t doing shit about it? What the hell’s wrong with you?”

  “Why don’t you do something?” Holly shoved him away, but he stepped right back in her face.

  “I’m trying, but they don’t listen to me the way they listen to you. Now answer the goddamn question: Why are you leaving Miranda hung out there on her own? They’re gonna massacre her.”

  “She… What?”

  “There but for the grace of God go I!” Mike cursed to the heavens.

  “You a religious kinda boy, Mike?”

  “Nothing Catholic school didn’t permanently cure. Where you been, Holly?”

  “Nowhere good,” was the only answer she had for him.

  “Spill it or I’m not letting you back in there.”

  Holly shook her head to clear it. A glance over her shoulder revealed Lizzy and Drake arguing inside the plane. Through another window, she could see Jeremy hard at work.

  “Where’s…” Then she spotted Miranda over by the wreck standing next to Major Jon Swift. “What’s up with that anyway? Do you think they’re—”

  “No more evasions, Holly. Spill.”

  Christ! She was already letting Miranda down? Couldn’t she ever be a part of a team without screwing everything up?

  “Team Chase. I just…”

  Now, Mike was suddenly all patience. He shifted from confronting her almost nose-to-nose to leaning against the wing beside her. He made the transition seem perfectly natural—right down to his shoulder just brushing hers. It was calming; perhaps all that let her continue.

  “In the SASR—that’s elite Australian warriors to you—we were in a six-person squad. Then I—” she swallowed hard then just spit it out. “I lost my team. I’m the one who lived.” Good thing she didn’t have a hari-kari knife at the moment.

  “What happened?” Mr. Sympathy. If this turned out to be manipulation, she’d kill him. But it didn’t feel like it.

  “We were tasked with taking out a bridge. Some Southeast Asian shithole. But we were supposed to drop it so that it looked like a structural failure—with the dictator’s convoy on the span. A hundred meters down into a rocky gorge. No survivors kind of show.”

  “That’s the sort of thing you used to do?”

  She nodded. “I’m an explosives kind of Sheila. I make big things, like that,” she nodded at the remains of the AN-124 Condor, “end up…looking like that.”

  “What happened?”

  “I woke early and slipped out of camp. I was under the bridge,” she could see it.

  Just dusk. The thick smell of the jungle slapped her again, even here in a Kentucky spring afternoon. Thick with decay and wilderness. More biomass in ten square meters than in a thousand square where she’d grown up. Moving so stealthily that it didn’t even disturb snoozing macaque monkeys.

  “Just getting a start. Climbing under it to identify critical structural points. I could have easily brought that bridge down with five kilos of C-4, but I wanted it to be elegant. Just enough and no more—to minimize evidence that it was any type of an attack. Our job was for no one to know we’d ever been there. So I was taking some measurements and had about two-thirds of the charges placed.”

  She’d felt the approaching vehicles vibrating the steel before she heard them.

  The dictator’s convoy hadn’t been due until dawn still ten hours away.

  No heavy military engines—tanks or armored personnel carriers. This guy was a former army general and liked keeping his troops close.

  But there were a lot of vehicles coming, fast ones. From the wrong direction, so it wasn’t the dictator.

  A squawk on her headset radio, “Hol?”

  “Under bridge. You’ve got incoming.”

  “Roger. Stay put.”

  The convoy had halted just past the end of the bridge.

  Inspection team? How paranoid was this guy?

  Using her climbing straps, she’d hauled herself up into the deepest shadows right against the underside of the bridge deck. Then she’d made sure she had no dangling lines that might catch someone’s attention.

  She had her Thales F90CQB Close Quarters Battle rifle across her chest. After checking that the magazine was full and the strap was wrapped around her arm so that she couldn’t drop it, she’d gone silent.

  Another convoy from the other direction.

  They halted close, but not too close.

  Not friendly.

  Or not too friendly.

  Rather than a military escort…a transfer point along the drug export chain? Around here that meant opium or refined heroin.

  “Just do your dirty and go away, guys. We don’t care about you tonight.”

  But they hadn’t listened.

  “Those idiots,” she told Mike, “a bunch of drug-running wankers, stumbled on our SASR team. Turned out it was a hundred to five. My guys took out over fifty while I was dangling there like an idiot monkey under the bridge unable to go help.”

  “Oh Christ. I can’t imagine what that was like.” Mike rested a hand on her shoulder, and she let it stay there for a few moments before shrugging it off.

  She didn’t want comfort.

  She didn’t deserve comfort.

  “What did you do?”

  “I slapped everything I had on the bottom of that bridge. When they rolled back over it, I fired off over thirty kilos of C-4. I didn’t just drop the bridge span—I blew it back into the Stone Age. Whoever thought they were escaping after taking down my team wasn’t left in big enough pieces for their mothers to identify them.”

  “Well, at least there’s that.”

  “I hung there, under the remaining cliff-edge stump of that bridge, all night and all the next day. I watched them come and search the wreckage—bird’s-eye view on that hundred-meter-down gorge. I saw them walk away with weapons, ones only my team would have been carrying. What if they were only wounded? Or captured? I killed my whole team, Mike.”

  “No, you don’t know that.”

  “Command sent in a body squad. Recovered the corpses, but results were inconclusive on a couple of them about whether they were dead or only badly wounded before I blew them up. Let’s just say that my commanders weren’t real happy about it. I could have waited alone. I could have waited through the night, blown that bridge myself, and offed their bastard of a dictator. Instead I destroyed the last chances for any of my team. At least that’s the consensus.”

  Mike’s hand was back, as if he couldn’t help himself bein
g consoling.

  She shrugged it off again, because she killed anyone she got close to.

  “And then,” Holly looked up at the darkening blue sky—dense with afternoon light so unlike the equatorial shit where she’d blown up her final bridge—because it was the only way to fight back the tears. “Then, I resigned so that they didn’t have to figure out what to do with me. I ran as far as I could.”

  “All the way to the American NTSB.”

  “Right. That should have been far enough, shouldn’t it?”

  “Right up until Miranda said Team Chase,” Mike nodded in understanding. “That’s rough.”

  “No shit, Sherlock! Worst of all, I’ve exposed her to fucking Elayne Kasprak and I don’t know how to undo it.” Holly wanted to scream but managed to keep it inside.

  “No, you didn’t. They’d have met with or without you. You saved her from Elayne.”

  “How in all that’s green is that even close to straight up?”

  This time Mike punched her arm.

  Someday she’d have to teach him to punch properly; he was lucky he didn’t break a knuckle.

  “Idiot, Holly. If you hadn’t been there, Miranda still would have solved what happened. She’d have told Elayne. Then what would have happened?”

  Holly pictured it. Miranda never would have left that shadowed cockpit alive. She’d have “slipped and fallen” onto something horribly sharp and lethal, her body ending up close beside Mr. Bones.

  “Yep!” Mike would have the same image in his head.

  “Where did you learn how to be devious? Church school?”

  “No. Well, a little. But no.” He sighed unhappily and Holly was suddenly sorry she’d asked. “Long story.”

  “I’m in no rush.”

  “No, but they are.” Mike nodded.

  Miranda and Major Swift were coming in their direction at a fast clip.

  Mike spoke quickly. “You’re one of the main reasons Team Chase works, Holly. So no more goofing off on the job. Okay?”

  Holly tried to think of how to thank Mike.

  For being understanding.

  For saying the right thing.

  She did the only thing she could think of.

  Holly punched Mike in the arm—hard.

  “Goddamn it!”

  39

  “Jon has a hypothesis that I think you will find interesting. It is not the way I think; his brain works in ways that I don’t fully comprehend or agree with.”

  He was always so glad to be talked about in the third person. Though maybe with Miranda he didn’t mind.

  They were crowded into the C-38’s small cabin. Three of the team on the small couch. Jeremy, unsurprisingly, fiercely attacking a computer keyboard. An older, attractive Asian woman in very neat civilian attire sat at a small table across the aisle.

  And the last person, with his back to him was…

  “Holy shit! Sorry, sir!” Jon almost took out his neck on the cabin ceiling as he tried to snap to attention in a place where the ceiling was three inches too low. Then he smashed his elbow into the back of the divider as he attempted to salute.

  “Jon? What the hell are you doing here?”

  Miranda had said, There’s someone you need to explain that to, when he’d come up with his idea.

  She left out that it was the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—Uncle Drake.

  “This was supposed to be classified,” Drake snarled at Miranda.

  “General Nason,” the Asian said in a soft, warning tone, and it stifled him instantly.

  “I’m losing my mind here,” he muttered and the woman patted his hand.

  “Wow! How did you do that? No one could ever shut down my uncle.”

  She looked up at him with curiosity. “Uncle?”

  “He’s Mom’s baby brother.”

  Uncle Drake had been more than stopped, he’d been squelched.

  “Fascinating.” The woman was watching him, not his uncle. “Tell me more. I’m his girlfriend, by the way, General Elizabeth Gray. Please call me Lizzy. You’re the first of his family I’ve met other than his daughter.”

  “Major Jon Swift at your service,” he decided against risking a salute again in the confined space. “His girlfriend? My uncle has a girlfriend?”

  “I hope that’s okay.”

  Jon didn’t know how he felt about that. Their families hadn’t been especially close—Dad based out of Coronado, California, and Uncle Drake in DC. But Aunt Patty had been…Aunt Patty—a thousand times more approachable than his uncle. In the five years since her death, they’d barely heard from Drake.

  In reply to General Gray’s question, he didn’t know how he felt. So he shrugged.

  “We’ll give it some time. You had an idea?”

  “Yes. But if this meeting is classified, perhaps I should depart.”

  “Drake,” Miranda used his uncle’s first name?

  Weird!

  “Is the reason that you said Major Swift was the only one I could trust no longer valid?”

  “A little nepotism perhaps?” Holly jibed. “No offense, Jon.”

  “None taken.” It was always easy to return Holly’s smile. “And no, it wasn’t. My uncle just knows that if I were to fail him in even the slightest way, my SEAL commander father would shred me limb from limb. It builds a certain kind of trustworthiness, I suppose.”

  “So, are you no longer his nephew or suddenly not susceptible to intimidation by your father or General Nason?” God but he loved the way Miranda asked questions. It made him look at everything as if it was fresh and new.

  “No problem from my side. Ask him,” Jon hooked his thumb at Uncle Drake.

  “What’s your goddamn idea?”

  “Blow up a plane.”

  His uncle eyed him as if he’d lost his mind. He’d never dared tease Uncle Drake; the man was so goddamn brilliant about military and geopolitical conflicts. A simple question of some military tactic at a family gathering could cause him to unload a two-hour discourse on historically shifting strategies and the lessons applicable to…

  Maybe dating another general was a good match for him.

  “The whole point is that we want the plane’s contents.”

  “I didn’t say blow up the plane, I said blow up a plane. Switch the planes and then utterly destroy the decoy.”

  “This is a Russian plane whose flight path is completely over Russian soil. Not the Arctic, no oceans, nothing.”

  Jon shrugged. “Even better, convince them to blow it up.”

  “Did I mention that we wanted the plane’s contents.” Uncle Drake’s tone was so droll it would have cowed him into silence under normal conditions. But with him having a girlfriend—still hard to imagine—and Miranda treating his fearsome uncle as an equal, he couldn’t quite help himself.

  “Duh! Switch planes and then have them blow it up.” Had he just called Uncle Drake slow? No way. But he had.

  Everyone just looked at him wide-eyed, except Miranda, who had understood right away.

  Jon looked around for how to explain himself. “Miranda, stand up and hold out your hand. It’s now an airplane flying at thirty-nine thousand feet.”

  “Which is my nose?”

  “Your fingertips.”

  She twisted around and faced the other end of the cabin as she held up her hand, palm down.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Flight level three-nine-zero is for westbound traffic. I’m pointing the nose of my hypothetical aircraft west.”

  He noted the direction of the late afternoon sun slanting through the windows.

  She was.

  “Okay, flight level four-three-zero.”

  She glanced over her shoulder at him. “Lizzy had said that the Russians would most likely be using an AN-124 Condor for transport.”

  “So you mentioned. Your point?”

  Then he knew what she was going to say. They ended up speaking in unison.

  “Service ceiling of thirty-nine thousa
nd feet.”

  “Flight level three-seven-thousand feet, please.”

  She turned around and aimed her fingertips at him with her palm still down, lowering her hand slightly to represent the change in altitude as she made the turn. She made him want to laugh aloud. But with the way Holly was watching him… He decided that cautious professionalism was a far better choice.

  “So, here you are, a fully loaded Antonov AN-1—”

  “At only seven meters long and seven thousand kilos, the Antonov is far from fully-loaded with a Persona satellite. Even with the launch housings and other packaging, the Antonov will be far from fully loaded.”

  “You’re right. Perhaps they have other items in the load or perhaps they are traveling well below capacity. Will a ‘loaded Antonov AN-124’ be a sufficient description?”

  Holly eyed him carefully to make sure he wasn’t teasing Miranda. Mike gave him a thumbs up.

  Miranda did exactly as he’d hoped and simply nodded, holding her “plane” at the ready. He understood her desire for precision. In his decade flying the C-5 Galaxy, the biggest cargo jet of the US military, he’d been a fanatic about it and saw no reason to change.

  “Please start flying east toward me.” Then he patted the table between Lizzy and Uncle Drake. “This is minimum radar detection altitude, say two-hundred feet.”

  “My hand is too big,” Miranda’s exactness, of course.

  “Your thumbnail?”

  “First joint of thumb would be more accurate.”

  Damn but she was fast.

  She held out her thumb, nail up, then tucked her other fingers so that they touched under her thumb knuckle. “It’s too narrow, but I think we’re close enough now.”

  “Okay, now dive down until your hand is below the table.”

  “But don’t crash it?”

  “But don’t crash it. General Gray, you’re our radar. If you can’t see her hand, she’s below the radar. Miranda, go.”

  Miranda slowed her engines, nosed down her thumb, and he’d wager that her rate of descent was proportional in scale as well.

  “Wave your hand side to side as you descend. Okay, her plane is now making erratic moves as if it’s in trouble.”